Ballin’ like Balliet: The legendary prank-play of Auburn’s most mysterious and winning-est percentage-est coach

D.M. Balliet (mustache) seen posing for a turn of the century picture with the Purdue football team, which he coached after his one-game, Bama-beating stint with the Auburn Tigers.

As Auburn’s head coach, Gene Chizik currently has an 80.7 win percentage. I think.

That’s only good for second best in Auburn history.

The title belt belongs to the most mysterious Auburn coach of them all, a Yankee journeyman who replied to George Petrie’s telegrammed solicitations to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn for a coach to relieve Petrie of his founding duties after the inaugural season of Auburn football, and surprisingly agreed to the terms for the unpaid, food-and-board only position.

His name was David M. Balliet. He was a former standout at center at Lehigh and later at power-house Princeton* and he coached and won just one game for the Auburn Tigers. As fate would have it, it was one of the most important in school history: the first Auburn-Alabama game (yep, this was intended for Beat Bama week – the Chizik win percentage stat saves the timeliness).

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Auburn has little record of the one-win wonder. But thankfully there’s Purdue, which is where Balliet took his perfect percentage shortly after the game with Alabama and settled into a successful head coaching stint with the Boilermakers, and where several photographs were taken of his mischievous mustache. (Dude just looks like a trickster.)

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